Progress Update: July

To do list from June of non quest/conversation stuff:
Finish sound and make sure it works ingame.
Get guards to react properly to a door that's open when it shouldn't be.
Set store hours and get that working.
Get conversational spell use working.
Add ambiance npc's in city exteriors and stores.
Get random results from pickpocketing working.

July:
Sounds all placed in game. Working in toolset, mostly not working  in game. Going to have to do some re-encoding.
Store hours: Ingame.
Exterior doors to stores and other building with hours close and lock at their closing time, unlock at open.
Guards reacting to doors: In, tested in test area. Demo video. Guards also are aware of store hours, so an open door when the store is open doesn't cause any notice, but an open door when the store is closed does.
Conversational spell use: Ingame.
Ambiance npc's : Commoner AI completed and released (http://neverwinter.nexusmods.com/mods/195/)
Random results from pickpocket: Sadly, looks to be hardcoded.

It looks like I was incredibly super productive. I have been quite productive, but all those things are things I've been working on for some time and I just percolated to completion this month.

Sounds I'd been working on for a couple months, researching and encoding, creating blueprints etc. Guards and doors was a week tweaking existing code I had made for guards and lights. Commoner ai work started last year, and had a demo release a few months ago. I spent a week this month ironing out bugs in buggy activities, improving performance, and integrating vfx for holdable items like books (since there are no equippable books). Conversational spell use it turned out I had working already, it simply wound up needing polishing of the code for animations.

Pictures:
First pic: I took a break from coding and put in some more verticality. A common request from people for Crimmor is roof top cat burgling. So this work will help support that, assuming I can get the walkmeshes working. The work also gives a more jumbled, people actually live here, look to the city, as opposed to a clean video game look.

Second pic: Commoner ai, these npc's were assigned to sit and read a book. The book is a vfx created by DannJ. With my commoner ai, you can animate an entire area of npcs, no matter how many, including different activities at different times of the day, and including making them go home and sleep, in thirty minutes. Yes, really.

Third pic: poor half orc, he doesn't get the concept of shoveling. The half orc model does not wield the quarterstaff shovel properly during the shoveling animation. Maybe half orcs just beat elves with the shovel until the elves do the shoveling. For those concerned about the small races and the quarterstaff shovel, I take care of that via temporarily granting the monkeygrip feat, allowing the small races to equip.

Working around hardcoding

Obsidian unfortunately left some things hardcoded that I'd like to access. Namely, pickpocket and the set/remove trap skills. These skills can be accessed via the context menu. Looking into the context menu, the options for the buttons include the ExecuteServerScript function. Does that mean it should be possible to run our own scripts there by replacing the standard call to UIRadialNode_OnInit_UseSkill(int,int) with UIObject_Misc_ExecuteServerScript("gui_mystuff")?

The UIRadialNode_OnInit_UseSkill ultimately activates a call to the UseSkill function, which is hardcoded and unavailable.If UseSkill could be recreated, we could simply route calls to it to our own version. Unfortunately, there's no where to get this. Even nwnx doesn't seem to have it. It would not be necessary to recode the entire function, even specific functions for the individual skills we'd call would be sufficient.

Progress Update: June

I had to solve a problem with my loadscreens, they weren't displaying ingame. Instead I was getting the default "Neverwinter eye logo" loadscreen. Errors in my 2da. I also made loadscreens for some areas I didn't have screens for, and updated a few loadscreens where I'd made changes to the area. So loadscreens are working again.

I've added a lot of static cameras throughout the module. There's a good amount of interacting with placeables via conversation, and some regular conversations where the location of the npc is known. Static cameras let me have more "cinematic" camera angles, and will hopefully make conversations more dramatic and enjoyable. I'm fully aware some people are not going to like Crimmor because they prefer nwn1 style conversations, just like I expected some people not to like Path of Evil because you played an evil PC.

Filled in some placeholder conversations, and somewhat developed a placeholder quest I'd put in to address a hole in the plot.

I've made a number of playthroughs of Crimmor. Fixing things as I find them. So things are looking more polished there, and the number of bugs is less. Still plenty of bugs. :-)

Current making my first pass through areas placing sounds. It's a large and lengthy project, since I'm doing all custom sound. Freesound project . First I had to get all that sound in a format NWN2 could use, then get things categorized at least somewhat. Then, since the filenames are not very descriptive, there's a lot of listening to things before deciding what to place.

To do list of non quest/conversation stuff:

Finish sound and make sure it works ingame. [edit: sounds now placed]
Get guards to react properly to a door that's open when it shouldn't be.
Set store hours and get that working.
Get conversational spell use working. [edit: now working]
Add ambiance npc's in city exteriors and stores.
Get random results from pickpocketing working. [edit: doing this they way I want requires editing pickpocket, which seems to be hardcoded]

Dragon Age Bundle

Amazon is currently selling Dragon Age Ultimate Edition for $16. They are also selling Dragon Age Ultimate Edition bundled with Dragon Age 2, for $10. This means Dragon Age 2 is apparently worth -$6.

Told to defend a dead end pc turns to face the approaching enemies, enemies instead spawn behind pc, in the dead end (behavior I actually witnessed in a youtube let's play video). -$6 sounds about right.

Freesound and Endless Space

Started work on doing sound for areas (eg there isn't any sound right now) with a lot of blueprint work on my sound project. If you need a custom sound effect, perhaps best place you can go is freesound.org. They have a huge collection. And best of all for the modder, it's all creative commons licensed.

A while back I'd downloaded a lot of sound from there, and spent time converting things to a NWN2 usable format. The blueprint work could have been done quickly by someone with some actual programming skills, but no one ever stepped forward for my request. I'd reached the point where I really needed to start adding sound, so I can get a feel for how things sound ingame during playthroughs, so I just started plowing ahead and making blueprints. Lots and lots of blueprints, roughly 2200. Anyway I'll be releasing all the custom sound work to the community for others to benefit from, just like I release all my loadscreens, areas etc. Total size of everything is a bit under a gig if you used everything. I don't see why anyone would need it all, but perhaps it will form a common sound hak like the common tile haks or common monster haks. I got the file size down to under a gig thanks to converting to mp3, then nwn2 usable wav. NWN2 gameworlds are going to be able to sound a whole lot better, and you won't have to listen to the same three bird sounds over and over again (I have multiple ten minute forest birds recordings in the pack...).

You can find the bioware social thread for it here http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/163/index/12546943  with links to download.

I've also been playing a lot of Endless Space, a 4X style game (think Civilization) set in space. It was released for purchase as an alpha on Steam. Even as an alpha, it's in good shape I think. I bought it after it was recommended on the NWN2 irc channel. Good fun for fans of 4X games. Anyone interested can see more at their Steam Store site http://store.steampowered.com/app/208140/ or their website http://endless-space.amplitude-studios.com/ .

Crimmor: Hidden Pocket Armor

Hidden Pocket armor allows you to hide weaponry (or potentially other items) on yourself in case you face a search by someone. If you remember my Hidden Weapons (http://kamalpoe.blogspot.com/2011/03/crimmor-hidden-weaponry.html), Hidden Weapon class weapons are accounted for (they hide themselves, and so do not count against the hiding capacity of the armors).

Picture one: Wearing Hidden Pocket leather armor, the guard doesn't see the short sword in my inventory. You can see in the message window the hiding capacity and capacity used of the hidden pocket items I am wearing. Hidden Pocket armor by itself can hide one small, and two tiny, weapons.

In picture 2, the fact I'm wearing hidden pocket armor doesn't help, because he can plainly see the weapon since it's in my hands

Picture 3, a dagger is hidden. You can see how the dagger falls into the Tiny category, as opposed to the small category the shortsword is in. Size categories are from http://nwn2.wikia.com/wiki/Weapon_size with a few adjustments (my Hidden Weaponry has hidden by default categories for some weapons, and I made slings tiny category because they can be folded up)

Picture 4, I've added Hidden Pocket boots to my Hidden Pocket armor, increasing my hiding capacity. Hidden Pocket armor has capacity 1 small, 2 tiny. Boots, Belt, and Bracers have capacity 1 tiny. This is defined in the script, so it could be changed.

Picture 5: Examine description of Hidden Pocket item, the armor in this case.

Picture 6: I'm wearing Hidden Pocket armor, but a longsword is too large to hide.

Map markers in Crimmor

Crimmor the city is laid out in a haphazard manner, much like an actual medieval city. There's no modern grid pattern, its mostly just a jumble of streets that go every which way and are rarely straight. I still get lost, and I built the place!

To ease things I've color coded the extensive set of map points visible on the minimap.

Red: marks safehouses, the guildhall, and the players house, these are friendly locations where resting is allowed (no resting on the streets or in some random merchants store!). Red also marks active quest locations, so your minimap will highlight where you need to go for quests. The red quest markers are only active while the quest for that location is open. For locations that have multiple notes, such as a store that becomes involved in a quest, the quest note takes precedence so there are not two notes at the same point. (I'm not recoloring a single note, I use multiple notes and display/hide as appropriate.

Green: these notes indicate a location name, Wight Alley, The Drae, Firesteep Square, Carn Market, etc. These are both for flavor as well as a potential marker to guide players on quests involving locating things ("He hangs out at Carn Market in Purse Ward").

Default color: generic points of interest such as stores.

Blue (may change, the shade I picked looks close to the green) : Dead drops, which function as quest givers. These are only located in the wards of the city you work as a fixer for.

Yellow (may change, looks close to default ingame): area transitions between the sections of the city.